This huge glaciation and mass extinction event eliminated about 85% of the planet’s species.
It was more than double the scale of the Chicxulub impact that killed off the dinosaurs.
That's mindblowing.
It does make you wonder whether life as we know it was a preceding civilization that launched life into the wider universe for the continued existence of life. But on tectonic timescales, any traces that e.g. a carrying vessel would have left behind are long gone.
Coal was only made once. Maybe if abiotic theory of petroleum is true, you get that back over immense timescales, but you don't get a second shot at coal. Without coal, you can't even do metallurgy at scale. Is there some gotcha that I'm missing?
Most projections suggest coal use is going to plummet over the next 50 years, both because we have better options and because we have little choice.
There’s enough coal in the ground to make earths atmosphere actively lethal to humanity. At ~70,000 ppm people are rendered unconscious in minutes and there’s enough coal go well over 100,000 ppm. There’s no way for humanity to use up the worlds coal as fuel, perhaps we could ship it into space as carbon source but that seems unlikely.
Sure. Already industrialized civilizations have better options. But if you're starting from scratch, you don't get to jump immediately to photovoltaics or whatever.
> and we’re running into environmental issues by burning ~1/1,000th of it.
But which 1/1000th? We didn't dig out the deepest coal first. "Economically viable coal" by 21st century standards isn't the same "economically viable coal" by the standards at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
Across geologic timescales what’s accessible changes. It makes a huge difference if deposits are above or below sea level for example. The Industrial Revolution kicked off in a small geological area which would have looked very different even 100k years before.
Even beyond that we’re actually more selective not less when it comes to coal mines. Unlike say copper/silver/gold/etc there’s so much coal that what would have been a perfectly viable mine 150 years ago simply isn’t today. Larger equipment means fewer workers but it also requires thicker coal seams. Similarly we’re a lot more picky about sulfur content etc.
That’s also somewhat true of stuff copper, gold, etc. The minimum concentration required to make ore viable has decreased dramatically, but only when there’s huge quantities of ore. Plenty of potential mines could be worked by hand, but can’t complete with industrial scale mines or be used as one.
PS: It’s worth remembering even if things aren’t quite as efficient they can be viable. Building canals takes more effort than rail lines but they can still transport bulk goods on the cheap using minimal technology. Similarly solar smelting can reach extreme temperatures, just not 24/7. Wood plus just about any rock can get you to steel with enough effort and know how. It might take slightly longer but our history isn’t the only way to get to transistors and spacecraft etc.
Edit: actually it seems like the coal resulting from lack of tree-consuming microbes theory isn't so widely supported these days.
Heck even the Himalayas have formed only 50 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_novel...
Or left it on the moon, I guess.
The moon is a harsh environment and (like most places in the solar system) exposed to significant danger from meteorites over geological timescales.
But now after being exposed to the true collective nature of mankind, it doesn’t matter. This species is a net negative for the universe. Just a bunch of monkeys squabbling over stupid things.
We're not important enough to be net negative, nor have we been around long enough. I am still hopeful that 10 million years from now, we'll have rampaged across the supercluster, spreading despair and wickedness in our wake.
Then, and only then, will we have achieved net negativity. Do your part, help us become that.
Paradoxically, "survival" assumes adapting to ever-changing circumstances, which means that homo sapiens, given enough time, is bound to evolve into one or multiple new species given enough time. Regardless of that happening elsewhere or on Earth.
Arguably, a species is just a mode of survival for a genome; a convenient vessel through time as the genome reproduces. The language we use is, ultimately, a social construct, but biological speaking by and large inconsequential in so far that language is a trait that fosters survival. Evolution isn't opinionated, it just 'is'.
The fate of the Neanderthal people feels apt here. While the species is extinct, our Sapiens genome still caries 1-4% of Neanderthal genes to date. Some of that influences traits in modern humans, some of that just doesn't. (Evolution is messy, in that regard) Now, maybe Neanderthals wondered - just like us today - what would become of them aeons in the future. Little did they know that we, Sapiens, are distant relatives to them.
In the same vain, our written record and collective memories spanning no longer then a few millennia, distant relatives in the far future may look back at our detritus in the soil and in their genes and maybe wonder the exact same thing.
Maybe the Great Filter isn't some civilization destroying event. Maybe it's just evolution. Maybe become a space-faring species might be the biggest mistake we could make. I think more then a few sci-fi authors coined the notion of the arrival of malevolent alien species in a distant future which turned out to be our distant relatives from space-faring humans who left Earth eons ago. Of course, that's just speculation. But there's some poetic food for thought there, it's a probability one can't readily exclude.
There's data out there about the First Ancestral Race but AFAIK they've never released the unredacted version of the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, so it's hard for the public to say.
It's seems like a pedantic distinction, but it's important. Earth doesn't care if we're here or not. The universe doesn't care if we're here or not. We are the only ones who should care, and we seem not to.
The planet will be fine, eventually, after we die out. Life will continue after we're long gone.
But we'll be long gone, and it's like we've all decided that's okay.
Or measured by longevity, or leisure time, or other living standards, all of which are drastically higher than they were only a few generations ago?
Perhaps humans are better drivers than you think?
What saved us was the surprising phenomenon that those societies tend to have quite low birthrates. Multiple possible reasons for that:
* high cost of living and raising children,*
* availability of birth control,
* waning social pressure of getting many children,
* no immediate economic benefits of raising children (in agrarian societies, they are essentially free labor on the farm, and a huge young population makes it easier to bootstrap an industrial economy). Of course, eventually there will be a problem when a huge percentage of the population is too old to work.
We will be fine as long as we can sustain agriculture:
* oil must be a-plenty to run farming equipment. It will be a long time before electricity has taken over
* we need farmland with intact soil and water
* we need fertilizer (phosphorus is running low soon, and oil is required as well)
* we need pollinators for many crops. Hand-pollinating is expensive
* We must not run out of pesticides to maintain yields
And probably some more requirements. If any of them is not fulfilled, society collapses and things can get ugly quickly. These things partly contribute to recent wars in Africa, the Middle East, and other places.
Edit:
*: low child mortality makes it necessary to actually support most children all the way to adulthood
It's only surprising if you (like Malthus and Erlich) had the intellectual arrogance to believe you could predict the future.
I cannot predict humanity's future, but I can look at our past, and our progress looks excellent so far. Betting against our continued success seems to require serious mental gymnastics.
I know things are bad but historically, I don't know how you can say that. In the 60's, 70s, and 80's we actually were, no-bullshit, on the brink of turning the world into a radioactive glass hellscape.
Despite all the turmoil in the world, I think things are looking up for humanity.
Have you watched the news lately?
I think there was something war related and people arguing about first strike and red lines.
Just because we are now used to the threat, does not mean it went away.
The other significant problem with this punchline is that it is still heavily human centric. we are not gonna go away without a major fight in/against biosphere. and guess what since we dont ascribe any value to it other than how its useful to us its going to take the brunt of destruction. at this point if we hold our population & resource utilzation where we are and eventually settle down to a smaller size I'd be okay with it as long as we give the rest of biosphere a chance but we all know thats not going to happen. We need to keep growing, thats the system we are in. And sure there will be some targeted geoengineering & green energy hopium for us to hang our concerns on but at the end of day we'd end up in the same place.
there was a line I read somewhere that made me realize our current predicament, it goes -- if a distant civilization just looks at the rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas composition of the planet, they wont be able to tell if its a intelligent species consuming fossil fuels or a bacteria that just learnt metabolize fossils and just growing exponentially. its the same curve largely. So much for human discretion & intelligence.
/rant end.
In the grand scheme of things, I'm tempted to say: if that's the price to pay to expand beyond it, then so what? It's not like it's the only planet in the Universe.
But so far it is the only known planet with conditions where we can live.
And I doubt we can make the jump to another planet we first have to find and then somehow survive getting there - when we cannot take care of our own planet.
(Btw. no matter how much we mess up earth, it will allways be way more hospital than mars)
I never understood the defeatism. It seems to arise from having the intellect to recognize that humans can (and do) have impact on their environment, and in the same breath resign on that impact being only negative and thus declaring that humans as a species should go extinct.
But there's so much good in this world that people do, isn't that worth saving? We know our capabilities are only limited by our own imagination, so why not strive for a grander human civilization that can span at least the solar system, if not the galaxy?
We can try, and we may still fail. Nothing is certain, except the way to ensure our demise by accepting that our fate is to go extinct and do nothing about it.
People posting on web forums, especially engineers, like to poke holes in things and aren’t big into expansion and exploration at the moment. Probably a bit depressed from sitting in front of their computers all day too.
Ask someone who just spent a month on the pacific coast trail, or who is about to go to Antarctica the question, and you’ll get a different set of answers.
I basically have to tune out all modern movies, television, news. Every new TV show is about some dystopia or the end of the world or a Zombie apocalypse or whatever. I watch mostly old TV shows from the 50s and 60s and read science fiction. In rare cases I'll watch a new show that's actually positive. You have to be careful though, even long-running franchises can quickly turn toxic when Hollywood gets a hold of it; Star Trek was headed that way until Strange New Worlds came out.
It actually correlates really well with the advent of teaching young children to be guilty about the civilization which gave birth to them. Maybe we shouldn't be slamming first graders with the ideas that everyone who came before them were supervillains and that they must shoulder the burden of correcting long dead injustices.
In any event, doesn't much matter. Every week there's a new article about how one nation or another has below-replacement fertility that doesn't seem to have any real prospect for reversing (tied to, more than anything else I think, what was described above). We are probably already a dying species, or at least heading into a post-civilization phase, and just don't know it yet.
I personally think that it's the most pragmatic view, if not the most rationale: with such an approach, only actions that are truly achievable retains attentions, if we try something, let's do the things that matters in the long run instead of trying literals shot in the stars.
Also, given the systematic and very damaging polarisation of all debates, I like being able to distance myself: it does not matter in the long run, so if the toxics annihilation has to happen, I won't be part of it, and it's probably the best I can actually do.
What I submit is that we are living in a society with a record level of depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses (the US for example is prescribing record levels of antidepressants). This record level of mental illness is simply spilling over onto the Internet. Why so many people in our society are ill is left as an exercise for the reader.
I would argue that this is mostly very (too) efficient marketing and sales though, cynical as it sounds.
I would like for us to get our house in order before we start this process.
So monitor stuff that you can't do nothing about. Great
As far as weather goes you don't need satellites. Baloons, planes, radars, drones, buoys do exist and paint a picture which is 99% the same.
The Apollo program failed to repay itself, plain and simple. Unlike the Manhattan project and the rocket designs stolen from the Nazis and developed by Von Braun which kept us safe for 50 years now.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/761/1
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/how-often-do-chic...
And endless papers on the subject. TEOTWAKI is a fun rabbit hole to dive in to.
Still, the Chicxulub asteroid is estimated to have caused a global cooling of the surface by around a decade, not 1,400,000 years.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...
Maybe. but per the Brittanica article cited:
> No concentration of iridium has been identified near the extinction that would suggest a bolide (meteorite or comet) impact like the one identified at the end of the Cretaceous Period.